“The Acusis is built around the XMOS XVF3000 voice processor, a single chip solution that supports up to four PDM microphones, USB and audio output, as well as on-board DSPs for beamforming and echo cancellation.”
Acusis is a simple-to-use, complete solution for improving the audio quality of your speech-recognition or video communications project.
It solves two common issues, all in a single device that hooks up to your project with standard USB protocols.
- Far-field reception: Acusis is designed to hear someone speak in a conversational voice from across the room.
- Echo cancellation: Acusis is designed to remove the “echos” of the sound your device is producing from what gets picked up by your microphone.
Also, Acusis is a linear array rather than circular, which makes it great for mounting on a monitor or TV.
If you’re building a project using a microphone today, or you just want better audio for your video chats or podcasts, Acusis is a great solution.
Why Acusis?
Acusis solves two really important problems for anyone building an audio/speech project:
Far-Field Reception
Acusis is designed to capture normal speaking volume from across a room, due to its advanced beam-forming microphone array. The microphones form a “phased-array”, working together to listen in the direction of the speaker. You may notice that the microphones are placed with varying spacing, that’s to help with beamforming. The spacing between a microphone pair is best for one frequency, so having different spacing helps cover more frequencies. Learn more about beamforming.
Echo Cancellation
Acusis is designed to remove the “echos” of the sound your device is producing from what get picked up by the microphone, significantly reducing feedback in the case of voice/video conferencing, and keeping your speech recognizer from hearing the audio you are creating. All you have to do is make sure your audio output is passed through Acusis and it will make sure it doesn’t feed that audio back to you.
Putting It Together
You attach Acusis to your computer/Raspberry Pi/custom system via USB. It will connect to your device as a USB microphone and a USB speaker. The reason it appears as a speaker is because to remove echos from the microphone input, it needs to receive the audio you are producing.
